‘MyScienceWork’ is the name of a new social network for research scientists and should soon appear in Internet. Virginie SIMON who is behind this creation, is a young engineer-doctor with a great passion for interdisciplinary work.
“My thesis work on the thematic of nanotechnologies, turned out to be pluridisciplinary, explains Virginie SIMON.” What I discovered rather rapidly was that each specialty field has its own ‘in-house’ language and dedicated data-banks”. In less than three years, when she was a young doctoral student, Virginie SIMON saw her start-up project grow from 3 to 35 staff, took part in the fund raising, recruitments, removals. “Over and above the interesting scientific content of my thesis, this professional experience really helped in that I was creating my own structure” recalls Virginie. ”My conclusion was that if I had managed to do my doctorate successfully, I was capable of accepting new challenges.”
No sooner had Virginie finished her doctoral studies, she donned the entrepreneurial hard-hat, so to speak, and created My ScienceWork. Her excellent knowledge of the research milieus and the data-banks used by research scientists allowed her to imagine a virtual ‘open house’ editors’ office combined with a scientific social network. Just like www.researchgate.fr a now well-known American network used by scientists, MyScienceWork will soon offer scientists and research scientists from many disciplines and academic circles, for Web 2.0 applications.
“The idea behind the project definitely is to provide a multilingual efficient communications tool, for the research scientists who will not only b e able to communicate among themselves through the social network, but also have access to papers, theses, publications and even create their own scientific library, set up working parties, make certain protocol aids available for their colleagues and sit in on virtual lectures, job forums, etc. “ There are some 30 different specialities represented on this community net which will be launched, if all goes well, during summer 2011. MyScienceWork will be the first professional social network in Europe.
